Listen Up!

DIGITAL AUDIOBOOKS ON THE RISE

Have you been keeping count?

      The number of books about Motown, its music makers and its backroom believers must now exceed three score and ten. Last year, significant additions to the total included Lamont Dozier’s How Sweet It Is and Eddie and Brian Holland’s Come and Get These Memories, not to mention Claudette’s Miraculous Motown Adventure from the former Mrs. Robinson.

      This year, there’s a twist: the growing number of Motown audiobooks, as this digital medium continues to strengthen its presence and popularity in the marketplace.

      West Grand readers with sound memories may recall three particular autobiographies published in the 1990s with spoken-word cassettes and/or compact discs: Berry Gordy’s To Be Loved, Diana Ross’ Secrets Of A Sparrow, and Raynoma Gordy Singleton’s Berry, Me and Motown.

      Years later, there was a move towards publishing books with Kindle offspring of hardcover or paperback parents. There are now more than 20 Motown-related Kindle titles, from the obvious to the unexpected. The former group includes To Be Loved, How Sweet It Is, and J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Diana Ross; the latter clutch includes Richard Street’s My Life As A Temptation and Hitsville tape librarian Fran Heard’s I Remember Motown.

      But now come more audiobooks, making news in this turbulent year. Among them are a revised, updated version of Otis Williams’ Temptations, released in March; the above-mentioned Come and Get These Memories, out just a few days ago; and Smokey Robinson’s Grateful and Blessed, which arrived in November.

A BOUNTIFUL LIFE

“I’ve known Diana Ross since Diana Ross was eight years old. Her family moved into a street four doors down the street from me, where I lived, when she was eight years old. And she was very, very close with one of my nieces, who was around the same age, and she used to spend the night at our house. And the Matadors and I, which was my group then, would be rehearsing like on my porch or in my basement. And she’d be sitting there, singing, harmonising along with me.”

      Such Robinson recollections in Grateful and Blessed add a dimension not available in the singer/songwriter’s 1989 autobiography, Inside My Life: namely, his animated, engaging and distinctive voice, flavoured with humour or whatever other emotion is summoned by each particular memory as he tells it. Most of all, he’s faithful to the title of this audio-only “book” (there’s no print equivalent). Here is a man of extraordinary talent who still doesn’t seem to take that talent – or the bountiful life it’s bestowed on him – for granted.

      In its own peculiar way, coronavirus has played a role. Grateful and Blessed is one of the collaborations between Amazon’s Audible subsidiary and production firm Gunpowder & Sky. “We’d talked about the series well before the pandemic,” Van Toffler of G&S told Forbes recently. “Then suddenly all of these artists had all this free time. Particularly at this time, for artists to tell stories about their music and songs and record while they’re home, it was like they said, ‘I’ll pay you to do this.’ It’s given people a bit of space and breadth to try a new format and create in a new genre for them.”

      Like other titles in Audible’s Words + Music line, the Robinson audiobook includes music performances by the star, recorded at home with the help of his longtime conductor, Demetrios Pappas.

      Meanwhile, the work of another Robinson – Claudette’s Miraculous Motown Adventure, created for children – is rather unusual, since the audiobook format can’t feature the illustrations which are as important to the physical edition as its poetry. But the timbre of her voice – so essential in the Miracles’ recordings – makes one wish that Claudette would speak an audiobook of her life, to augment the one by her former spouse.

      The Robinsons aside, the range of Motown audiobooks includes two by Mark Ribowsky, namely, Signed, Sealed, and Delivered and Ain’t Too Proud To Beg (no prizes for guessing their respective subjects). Similarly, David Ritz is represented by his signature work, Divided Soul, and Jan Gaye’s After The Dance, on which he collaborated. None of these four volumes are voiced by their authors; instead, professional narrators have been drafted, such as Robin Ellar and Kevin Free.

      Otis Williams does make an audio appearance in the reissue of Temptations, but the bulk of the narration is done by J.D. Jackson. Peter Benjaminson’s The Story Of Motown is voiced by Sean Crisden for its audiobook; the original came out 41 years ago, to be republished in 2018 in paperback, Kindle and audiobook editions.

THE MOOD, NOT THE TITLE

“I thought ‘Baby Love’ was the stupidest title I ever heard. It took me two weeks to even agree to write that song because it was the dumbest title – ‘I can’t write this!’ But then I started looking at the melody, getting a feel for it and I realised. What is the principle you taught yourself? It’s the feel that’s important, and the ideas that carry the feel. And when they coincide with the melody and the sentiment, that’s what you go by, by the mood that it creates. That’s what I used for ‘Baby Love.’”

      And that’s an excerpt from Come and Get These Memories, the newest, Motown-related audiobook, published by Audible on December 1. If you’re familiar with the memoir, you’ll know that Eddie and Brian Holland recount their life stories separately, and together. They are voiced by Kevin Kenerly and Rodney Gardiner in the Audible release, which is unabridged from the original work and runs for a substantial nine-and-a-half hours.

      Whether or not you care for the spoken-word format, the brothers’ life story remains as fascinating and detailed as in the print version, which was written with Dave Thompson. The Audible edition retains the foreword by the late Motown kingpin, Barney Ales, as well as the lyrics of four new songs authored by the Hollands, although these have minimal appeal when recited without melody, rather than performed by a singer. Understandably, it does not include the detailed discography which appears in the print version; that would hardly make for a compelling audio experience.

      Come and Get These Memories is three hours shy of being the longest Motown audiobook. That distinction belongs to Ribowsky’s Stevie Wonder biography (12 hours, 45 minutes), followed by the same author’s tale of the Temptations (11 hours, 32 minutes). In the midrange is Benjaminson’s The Story of Motown (5 hours, 26 minutes). Hey, if Randy Taraborrelli’s 585-page Call Her Miss Ross were ever to become voiced, one can hardly begin to imagine the running time.

      Meanwhile, Grateful and Blessed (100 minutes) is a hit. In Audible’s latest countdown of top-selling, non-fiction titles, as published on December 1 by Associated Press, it stands at No. 7, behind Barack Obama’s A Promised Land and Common’s Mind Power Mixtape, among others, but ahead of Michelle Obama’s Becoming.

      When it comes to chart placings, you can bet Smokey Robinson is keeping count.

Book notes: as noted, there are more than 20 Hitsville-related books in Kindle editions, including Susan Whitall’s Women of Motown, Mickey Stevenson’s The A&R Man, Graham Betts’ Motown Encyclopedia and Peter Benjaminson’s biographies of Florence Ballard, Rick James and Mary Wells. Although Motown audiobooks published on cassette/CD in the ’90s are no longer available except from second-hand sources, at least three such works have been posted – where else? – online. They are Berry Gordy’s To Be Loved, Diana Ross’ Secrets Of A Sparrow, and the second of Mary Wilson’s autobiographies, Supreme Faith. Beyond Motown, audiobooks abound about other music stars. Those voiced with soul, as it were, include Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, Prince, Luther Vandross, Janet Jackson, Alicia Keys and, separately, Earth Wind & Fire’s Maurice White and Philip Bailey.